Im-Politic: Welcome Polling News for Immigration Realism

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Biden border crisis, Center for Immigration Studies, Democrats, Gallup, Im-Politic, Immigration, independents, polls, public opinion, Republicans, YouGov

Two sets of poll results sure don’t make a trend. But they’re sure more convincing than one set of poll results. So recent surveys from Gallup and YouGov could signal an encouraging turning point in U.S. public opinion on immigration issues – and one brought about by the epic failure of the Biden administration’s Open Borders-friendly statements and actions.

Gallup’s findings were posted on August 8. The headline development? The share of American adults contacted between July 5 and 26 believing that immigration levels should be decreased stood at 38 percent. That’s the highest level since June, 2016 and up from 31 percent last June. Moreover, the annual percentage- point increase was the biggest since 2008 and 2009 – when the economy was mired in the Great Recession that followed the global financial crisis.

The share of respondents who wanted immigration levels to be decreased or remain the same (69 percent) was also the highest since June, 2016 (72 percent) and up from 66 percent last year.

By an overwhelming 70 percent to 24 percent, Gallup found that Americans agree that “on the whole” immigration is a “good thing” rather than a “bad thing.” But even though this question seems to focus on immigration views in the abstract, with no relation to current conditions, the “good thing” share of responses fell from 75 percent last year, and the “bad thing” responses rose from 21 percent.

In addition, the “good thing” responses represented the lowest percentage of the total since 2014 (63 percent) and the “bad thing” responses the highest since 2016. And the 46 percentage-point margin enjoyed by the “good thing” responses is a drop from last year’s 54 percentage points and the smallest since 2014’s 30 percentage points.

Also striking in the Gallup results: It’s no surprise that the 69 percent of respondents identifying as Republican wanting less immigration is by far the highest total since Gallup began asking these questions (surpassing 2009’s 61 percent). It’s also no great surprise that independent identifiers agreeing with this stance has rebounded lately a bit to 33 percent (though still far below its high of 51 percent in 2002.

But it’s really surprising, especially given their loathing of immigration restrictionist Donald Trump and the growing influence of progessives in the party, that the share of Democratic identifiers supporting less immigration is up from 12 percent last year to 17 percent this year.

The YouGov survey was conducted in late July, and reported that by a 35 percent to 31 percent margin, Americans believed that immigration “makes the country” “worse off” instead of “better off.” According to Andrew Arthur of the Center for Immigration Studies, that’s a huge turnabout from what the same outfit found in September, 2019. Then, “better off” won by 43 percent to 19 percent.

At the same time, this latest YouGov survey found that 31 percent of Americans support increasing legal immigration versus 22 percent who want it reduced. Gallup didn’t draw the (critical) legal/illegal distinction. I don’t know how these results have changed over time. But the sheer size of the discrepancy indicates that even if American opinions are moving their way, it’s still far from certain that restrictionists (who I of course consider to be the adults in the room) have won the day.

Im-Politic: Objectivity in American Journalism Going, Going….

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Gallup, Im-Politic, journalism, liberals, Mainstream Media, media bias, news media, objectivity, Pew Research Center

No one who’s been paying attention should be surprised by a recent Gallup survey showing that the American public’s trust in journalism is near rock bottom. As the polling company (again) makes clear, it’s been falling steadily for half a century.

What even I was surprised at were the results of another sounding that explains much of the reason why: A wide gulf has opened between the news media and its readers and viewers on the definition of journalism’s fundamental mission. Specifically, according to the Pew Research Center, although by landslide proportions, a majority of Americans believe that “Journalists should always strive to give every side equal coverage” in news reports, a smaller majority of journalists themselves – but still a sizable majority – doesn’t.

Also interesting and important (and seemingly consistent with the above finding), the same July 13 Pew findings make clear that the public gives journalists low marks on what the news media in recent years has often and loudly proclaimed to be its paramount purpose and contribution to American democracy: “Serving as a watchdog for elected leaders.”

First, the “evenhandedness” results. According to Pew, by a 76 percent to 22 percent margin, U.S. adults regard it as a hallmark of good journalism. But by 55 percent to 44 percent, journalists believe that “Every side does not deserve equal coverage.”

There’s a partisan gap in public opinion here, but it’s not enormous. Eighty seven percent of Republicans and Republican leaners value evenhandedness versus 68 percent of their Democratic counterparts.

More troubling, at least to me, the evidence points to a partisan gap that’s wider among news people themselves. The Pew researchers asked journalists who believe their audience “leans right” the evenhandedness question they endorsed this objective by 57 percent to 42 percent. But the journalists who believed their audience “leans left” rejected it by 69 percent to 30 percent. (News people who believe that their audience is “mixed” politically are split on this question.)

In addition, by 32 percent to 20 percent, journalists describe their news organization as leaning left versus leaning right, which strengthens the case for another important finding of partiality – most of it favors left-of-center views. For good measure, these data dovetail nicely with numerous surveys over many years (see, e.g., here) documenting a pronounced liberal tilt in their ranks.

In principle, this imbalance needn’t prevent journalists from effectively and evenhandedly holding the powerful to account. But the Pew results at least show that the public isn’t convinced that journalists perform well in “Serving as a watchdog over elected leaders.” Only five percent graded them “Very good” and just 24 percent “Somewhat good” at this task. The “Very bad” and “Somewhat bad” results were 24 percent and 21 percent, respectively. (Twenty six percent rated journalism as “Neither good nor bad.”)

I’ll acknowledge that the evenhandedness issue isn’t as clearcut as these Pew questions might suggest. For example, when it comes to reporting verifiable facts, every depiction clearly doesn’t deserve equal coverage. At the same time, aside from genuinely settled scientific or mathematical questions, the number of incontrovertible facts isn’t nearly as great as has often been supposed. Think of the Trump-Russia collusion claims, the mainstream media’s treatment of the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, the CCP Virus lab leak controversy, and the whipping Haitian migrants charges. And before the Trump era, these news organizations overwhelmingly cheerled for the second Iraq War, the reckless expansion of trade with China, and Open Borders-friendly immigration policies.

Maybe most depressing: The Pew poll strongly suggests that the news media will keep covering stories in a one-sided manner. Specifically, it found that journalism’s strongest opponents of evenhanded journalism are the youngest journalists – who reject this aim by 63 percent to 37 percent if they’re between 18 and 29 years of age, and by 63 percent to 49 percent if they’re in the 30-49-year old cohort.

Im-Politic: More Evidence That it Really is a Biden Border Crisis

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Alejandro Mayorkas, Biden, Biden administration, Biden border crisis, Central America, El Salvador, Gallup, Guatemala, Honduras, Im-Politic, Immigration, Mexico, migrants, migration, Northern Triangle, polling

If there’s something that “everybody knows” about the floods of Latin Americans who keep trying to migrate to the United States, legally and not, it’s that they’re acting out of desperation because their countries are such terrible places to live. As stated just this morning by Alejandro Mayorkas, U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security, in the wake of news that 53 migrants found dead in the back of a sweltering tractor trailor that had snuck them across the U.S.-Mexico border paid the ultimate price for risking the dangerous journey northward:

“The migration that is occurring throughout the hemisphere is reflective of the economic downturn, increase in violence throughout the region, the — the result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the results of climate change.”

Surely the perils that have long faced Latin Americans (and many others) seeking new lives in America have been grave, and the living conditions (and physical dangers) in their home countries have often been appalling.

But what, then, is the explanation for four straight years of polling data from Gallup that consistently show the populations of some of the leading sending countries to be among the happiest on earth?

Recently, through an annual series of Global Emotions Reports, Gallup has tried to measure “positive and negative experiences” in most of the world’s countries to determine their people’s “day-to-day emotional states – such as enjoyment, stress, or anger – as well as their satisfaction with their lives.” Countries are then scored on a scale of 100, with the highest marks indicating where people by an average of these measures are happiest. (See here and here for these descriptions.) 

So it’s more than a little interesting that for most of the last four years (through 2021), the world’s happiest countries have included El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico. Because, after all, the first three comprise Central America’s “Northern Triangle,” and collectively become the source of the largest number of immigrants arrested at the U.S.’ southern border as of fiscal year 2021. The latter remains the country that’s generated the most arrestees of any individual country. Here are the annual results from Gallup, including their score on that 100 scale and their global ranking.  (For links to the downloadable 2018-2020 reports and the 2021 report, see here.)  

                                    2018              2019            2020            2021

Guatemala                 3d (84)         2d (84)     not surveyed       n/a

Honduras                   4^th (83)         5^th (81)     not surveyed   3d (82)

El Salvador                4^th (83)         2d (84)        1^st (82)         3d (82)

Mexico                      3d (84)          4^th (82)           n/a               n/a

As is clear, Honduras and El Salvador have been among the top five happiest countries for three of these four years. Mexico and Guatemala made this list in 2018 and 2019.

Unfortunately, when it comes to 2020, Guatemala and Honduras were not surveyed. And because Gallup hasn’t provided the scores and rankings for every country it’s studied, no results were available for Mexico in 2020 and 2021, and for Guatemala in 2021.

But as Gallup noted in 2020, “While several of the countries that usually top the list every year, including Panama, Honduras and Guatemala, were not surveyed in 2020, the region is still well represented on the Positive Experience Index. El Salvador leads the world with an index score of 82.” So it sounds like the pollsters believe that countries for which data is missing or not reported stayed pretty happy.

Also striking – the happiness scores of these four major sending countries were not only among the world’s highest. They were way above the global averages, which respectively were 71, 71, 71, and 69.

Polls, as I’ve repeatedly said, are by no means perfect, and polling in developing countries can be especially tricky because inhabitants often do live in dangerous environments where even the authorities (and often especially the authorities) can’t be trusted.

But these Gallup results are consistent over several years. And they are so at odds with the conventional wisdom about the deep-seated socio-economic reasons for hemispheric migration that they seem to add to the evidence that the recent surge stems less from changes in those root causes — or perhaps from these root causes at all (as opposed to seeking improvement, not survival or freedom) — and more from the more permissive immigation measures and rhetoric emanating from the current U.S. administration from Day One. That is, the recent situation really is a “Biden border crisis.”

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Pointless Polls on Ukraine

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Associated Press, Biden, Gallup, National Opinion Research Center, NATO, North Atlantic treaty Organization, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, polls, public opinion, Putin, Russia, Ukraine, YouGovAmerica

Here are two of the weirdest polling releases I’ve seen in a long time.  And both concern the Russian invasion of Ukraine – not exactly a trivial issue.

The first is a Gallup survey from yesterday with findings on American views on the Ukraine conflict that (unwittingly, it seems) leaves the subject more mysterious than ever.

Gallup reports that, just before Russia invaded Ukraine, “52% of Americans [saw] the conflict between Russia and Ukraine as a critical threat to U.S. vital interests. That’s a change from 2015, after Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula, when less than half of U.S. adults, 44%, thought it posed that serious a threat.”

Keep in mind that “vital” literally means needed to ensure the physical survival, or at least the independence of the country. And even if respondents didn’t have that particular definition in mind, surely they equated the term with first-order importance. In either case, you’d think logically that at least a sizable portion of those viewing the Ukraine conflict as a “vital threat” would support a U.S. military response.

But in this survey, Gallup never even posed the question. And its additional queries created even more confusion. Chiefly, a big plurality (47 percent) favored keeping the U.S. commitment to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) “where it is now” – even though the challenges facing the alliance obviously have grown dramatically.

Another 18 percent did favor an increase to the commitment. But the same share of respondents wanted it decreased. And 13 percent supported “withdrawing entirely.” “Go figure” seems to be what Gallup is suggesting.

The second bizarro poll was conducted by the Associated Press and the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. Between February 18 and February 21 (the day Russian leader Vladimir Putin ordered troops to enter eastern Ukraine), these pollsters asked American adults whether they thought the United States should play a “major,” “minor,” or “no role” in the situation between Russia and Ukraine.” What on earth does that mean?

For the record, 26 percent backed a major role, 52 percent a minor role, and twenty percent no role. That sure sounds like strong opposition to a step as dramatic and fraught with peril as joining a conflict with a nuclear-armed superpower. But these results say absolutely nothing about what kind of role should or shouldn’t be played, which matters a lot because the range is so wide among sending troops, expressing rhetorical support, and all the options in between. And why ignore the troops question in the first place?

Not that all pollsters have sidestepped the issue. The YouGovAmerica firm conducted a survey for The Economist of U.S. adult citizens earlier this month – between February 5 and 8. It found that by a 55 percent to 13 percent, respondents considered it a “bad idea” versus a “good idea” to “send soldiers to Ukraine to fight Russian soldiers.” Fully a third weren’t sure.

But even this survey wasn’t devoid of weirdness. Chiefly, YouGov asked about the option of “Sending soldiers to Ukraine to provide help, but not to fight Russian soldiers.” Granted, the actual Ukraine war was still a hypothetical at that point. But what gave the pollsters the idea that this option was remotely realistic? Or prudent, given the tendency of large-scale fighting to become larger scale fighting, and embroil nearby regions and populations. (The public was split almost exactly into thirds among the “good idea,” “bad idea” and “not sure” alternatives.)

Politicians are fond of bragging that they don’t make policy based on polls. At least when it comes to the war and peace decisions presented by the Ukraine conflict, these surveys make clear that’s something to be grateful for.

Im-Politic: The Mainstream Media’s Approval Ratings (Rightly) Keep Sinking

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Fox News, Gallup, globalism, Hunter Biden, Im-Politic, Joe Biden, journalism, Mainstream Media, media bias, MSM, news media, Sean Hannity, Trump

Some RealityChek readers have noted (and kind of griped) that I spend a lot of time here attacking the performance of the Mainstream Media (MSM) – and they’re right. This focus stems from two related reasons: First, this performance (as I’ve documented extensively*) has not only been genuinely terrible when it comes to getting facts and their obvious implications straight, but it’s been genuinely terrible in an overwhelmingly pro-globalist vein, including on trade, immigration, and foreign policy issues, and of course on the highest profile of all critics of these views – President Trump.

Second, media performance deserves attention because they’re supposed to play such a crucial watchdog role in our democratic republic. Yet their biases have been so flagrant, and even so deliberate, that these news outlets are no longer serving as a source of reliable, trustworthy information, and consequently keep weakening the foundations of accountable government.

Anyone skeptical should take a look at a new Gallup poll that tries to measure how Americans view the ethics of major occupations. I know that pollsters didn’t exactly cover themselves with glory during the last presidential election, but journalists coming in tenth of the fifteen categories mentioned has “epic fail” written all over it. The only occupations ranking lower? Lawyers, business executives, advertisers, car salesmen (apparently new and used) and Members of Congress. (They came in dead last.)

To be sure, Gallup didn’t single out MSM journalists in its survey, so reporters and editors with a less America First-y outlook, as with many (but by no means all) newspeople in conservative outlets like Fox News were undoubtedly included in the ranks of the mistrusted. But the highly skewed partisan divide reported strongly suggests that it’s the MSM (which, being mainstream, is by definition the media that reach the biggest audiences) that’s got the biggest problem.

If this wasn’t the case, why would only 28 percent of Americans considering themselves political independents give journalists “very high” ratings for ethics and honesty? (The figures for Republicans and Democrats were five percent and 48 percent, respectively.)

It would be great to think that, with Mr. Trump out of public office (if not necessarily the limelight), the MSM might recover some of its integrity. But the timid coverage of apparent president-elect Joe Biden so far, and of the worrisome foreign business dealings of his son, Hunter, don’t justify much optimism. 

As Fox News-talker Sean Hannity (not my favorite) complained during the presidential campaign, the MSM in effect put Biden into a “candidate protection program.” If this approach continues into his likely administration, the next Gallup report could show media trustworthiness sinking further – and America’s democratic republic under even greater strain.

*During my long tenure at the U.S. Business and Industry Council (USBIC), I first began going after news coverage of trade and globalization issues (as well as policy decisions and proposals) in 1997 or so in two series of reports sent around by fax called “Globalization Follies” and “Globalization Factline.” Eventually, they were all posted on the organization’s AmericanEconomicAlert.org website. But shortly after I left USBIC, in 2014, the website seemed to have gone dark, and the only decent set of surviving records is in my computer files.

Im-Politic: About That Systemic Police Racism Charge

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African Americans, Gallup, Im-Politic, Pew Research Center, police, polls, race relations, racism, systemic racism

For the longest time, it’s been widely noted that polls tend to send two unusually strange and related messages: First, Americans’ views of their own personal situations, and of the national situation, often differ tremendously; and second, the first is much brighter than the second.

So for instance, poll respondents can dismiss Congress as a bunch of incompetent crooks, yet voters keep reelecting their own representatives – in the most important poll of all. They can condemn America’s healthcare system as a mess, but make clear how much they like their own coverage.

But familiar as I am with this pattern, I was stunned to see it appear in a Thursday Gallup poll about African Americans and their encounters with the police.

Taken on their own, the findings seemed narrative-busting enough. The Gallup headline was pretty par for the recent course: “For Black Americans, 41% of Police Encounters Not Positive.” That’s hardly confirmation of the apparently emerging conventional wisdom that American law enforcement is plagued by systemic racism.

After all, even the downbeat wording of the header suggests that 59 percent of these encounters have been positive for African Americans. The actual results are even more surprising, given how systemic the systemic charge has become. Specifically, 73 percent of African Americans polled reported that during their “interactions with police,” they were “treated with respect.” And 74 percent said they were “treated fairly.”

To be sure, these percentages are lower than for whites (by 20 percentage points for the overall positive/non-positive assessment, by 17 percentage points when it comes to respect, and by 19 percentage points when it comes to fairness). But although these gaps are hardly trivial, all the readings are well into majority positivity, respect, and fairness territories. And even the finding that provides the most support for the systemic racism charge is kind of suspect when you think about it. After all, let’s say that any driver is stopped by a police car and (justly) ticketed for speeding. Whatever his or her race, what driver is likely to feel great about the experience?

And these findings also fit the broader polling pattern of individuals assessing their own personal situations as being better than relevant broader situations. For example, in early 2019 (i.e., not so long ago), Gallup  reported that 77 percent of African Americans reported believing that “blacks in their community” are “treated less fairly than whites” in “dealing with the police, such as traffic incidents.” FYI, the questions were asked in 2018.

Moreover, not only does that finding clash pretty loudly with the results from this past Thursday about African Americans’ own personal experiences. It also clashes pretty loudly with the results from that same 2019 poll’s findings on African Americans’ own personal experiences. When asked “Can you think of any occasion in the last 30 days when you felt you were treated unfairly in the following places because you were black?”, only 21 percent of blacks answered “Yes.” Maybe the limited timeframe held down the “yes” responses for individuals. But if police racism really is systemic, you’d think that for the African American respondents as a whole, the time interval problem would fade away.

And here’s an interesting kicker: The 21 percent figure isn’t the all-time high recorded by Gallup. That came in 2004 – during George W. Bush’s Presidency.

Nor is Gallup the only polling organization to report a large gap between African Americans’ views on police racism generally, and on their own experiences with police. An April, 2019 Pew Research Center survey found that 84 percent of African Americans believe that “in general in our country these days, blacks are treated less fairly than whites in dealing with police.” But only 44 percent said they had been unfairly stopped by police.

None of this is to say that there are no racial issues in American law enforcement. After all, that 44 percent Pew figure doesn’t translate into “most,” but it’s still disturbingly high. My own personal conversations with black friends have helped convince me (despite my deep mistrust of the evidentiary value of anecdotes) that there is a tendency on the part of a non-negligible number of police officers across the country to view African American men in particular with special suspicion, and to act on these suspicions. South Carolina Republican Senator Tim Scott’s alleged experiences in this respect carry weight with me, too.

But recognizing the importance of these instances is a far cry from proving that  American law enforcement as a whole is afflicted with systemic racism, however you define the term. And the Gallup and Pew results represent two more reasons for caution about this conclusion.

Glad I Didn’t Say That! One Clueless Peacock

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Andy Lack, CCP Virus, coronavirus, COVID 19, Gallup, Glad I Didn't Say That!, journalism, Mainstream Media, media, MSNBC, NBC News, news media, polls, Trump, Wuhan virus

“Journalism is under attack from coronavirus and the White House. But we’re winning.”

– Andy Lack, Chairman of NBC News and MSNBC, April 27, 2020

Share of Americans approving President Trump’s coronavirus response: 60 percent

Share of Americans’ approving the news media’s coronavirus response: 44 percent

– Gallup poll, March 25, 2020

(Sources: “Journalism is under attack from coronavirus and the White House. But we’re winning,” by Andy Lack, “Self Explanatory,” Think, NBC News, April 27, 2020, https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/journalism-under-attack-coronavirus-white-house-we-re-winning-ncna1192306 and “Coronavirus Response: Hospitals Rated Best, News Media Worst,” by Justin McCarthy, “Politics,” Gallup.com, March 25, 2020, https://news.gallup.com/poll/300680/coronavirus-response-hospitals-rated-best-news-media-worst.aspx)

Im-Politic: Evidence that Trump Would Be Foolish Not to “Run on China”

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2020 election, CCP Virus, China, climate change, coronavirus, COVID 19, cybersecurity, Democrats, environment, Gallup, human rights, Im-Politic, Jobs, Joe Biden, Pew Research Center, polls, public opinion, Republicans, tariffs, Trade, trade deficit, trade war, Trump, Wuhan virus

Monday I laid out the case that presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has cheer-led every major Washington policy decision in recent decades that has enabled the rise of a wealthy, powerful, and worst of all, hostile and dangerous China. So it’s at least awfully interesting that the day after, a new poll was released making clear that the Trump campaign’s decision to brand the former Vice President as “soft on China” is not only on the mark substantively, but a smart political move.

The poll, conducted by the Pew Research Center, shows that Americans of all political stripes have turned into strong China critics. And especially important – there’s much more going on here than blaming Beijing for the CCP Virus outbreak. Respondents across-the-board now strongly agree that China poses a major threat to a wide range of U.S. interests – including on the trade front, where President Trump’s tariffs were widely reported to be devastating pretty much every major group of actors in the American economy, from businesses to consumers, and from farmers to manufacturers.

P.S. It’s not like Pew has ever itself shown any signs of being critical of China. Indeed, its introduction to the results includes this moral equivalence-friendly assessment: “…with the onset of an unprecedented pandemic, the stage has been set for both sides to cast aspersions on the other.”

The finding Pew emphasizes is a dramatic rise in unfavorable American views of China since Mr. Trump’s inauguration. When he entered office at the beginning of 2017 , the respondents Pew interviewed disapproved of China, but only by a narrow 47 percent to 44 percent margin. The most recent results show unfavorable ratings thumping favorable by 66 percent to 26 percent. The latest negative reviews garnered by Beijing, moreover, represent its worst such showing since Pew began asking the question in 2005.

And as Pew points out, looking at this divergence over time makes clear that China’s ratings began deteriorating long before the virus appeared. In fact, the sharpest increases in Beijing’s unfavorables and sharpest decreases in its favorables started in 2018 – when the administration began announcing and imposing steep levies on huge amounts of prospective imports from China.

Indeed, China’s image among Americans is now so bad that it’s shared among Democrats and Republicans alike. Frustratingly, the survey doesn’t measure the attitudes of declared political independents, but the latest figures show that 72 percent of Republicans and those “leaning” Republican hold unfavorable views of China, and that 62 percent of Democrats and their “leaners” agree. And both negatives are up sharply since the trade war began – or more accurately, since the United States started fighting back.

Not that trade is the only China-related concern expressed in the Pew survey, or even the strongest. Pew gauged U.S. opinion on several China-related issues, and the biggest worries were voiced over “China’s impact on the global environment.” Fully 91 percent of respondents labeled it as a “very serious” or “somewhat serious” problem for the United States, the former responses hitting 61 percent. Next came “cyberattacks from China,” rated as problems by 8 percent of those surveyed, and as “very serious” problems by 57 percent.

Coming in third and fourth were the economic issues. Eighty five percent saw the U.S. trade deficit with China as a problem, including 49 percent calling it serious. And for “the loss of U.S. jobs to China,” the numbers came in at 85 percent and 52 percent, respectively. Interestingly, those latter results nearly matched those for the issue of “China’s growing military power” (84 percent and 49 percent, respectively).

Important to note, however, is evidence that, high as they are, the economic concerns have been leveling off in recent years, while the environmental concerns have been rising (along with those centered on human rights). That’s not necessarily great news for Mr. Trump, whose focus has been on the jobs and overall economy impact (along with the technological threat from China – which is a major source of public China-related concern).

Much better news for the President – Americans aged 50 and older (whose voter turnout rates have long been high) – hold the most negative views of China. Yet this year, Beijing’s image has turned negative for Americans in the 18-29 age class for the first time ever. And for both groups, disapproval of China surged starting in 2018.

Of course, China’s not the only issue on which Americans will be voting this fall. But the latest Gallup results, for example, show that virus-related issues have surged to the top of their rankings for the “most important problem facing the U.S.” If the President can link the virus with the overall China challenge in voters’ minds, his odds of reelection would seem to be pretty good. His biggest obstacle? Possibly the companion Gallup finding that right behind the virus on the list of national problems is “The government/poor leadership.”

Following Up: Why Many of America’s Widest Divides Aren’t What You Think

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college-educated, Democrats, education, Following Up, Gallup, healthcare, inequality, minorities, non-college, opportunity, partisanship, polling, polls, race relations, Republicans, whites

“An anxious and divided nation cast its first votes,” the headline in the Washington Post moaned this morning.

As yesterday’s RealityChek post reported, though, some impressive evidence came out last week showing that the nation isn’t all that anxious, or fatally divided in the most general terms, after all. At the same time, diving into that evidence’s internals shows no shortage of divisions – only many of the dividing lines are pretty surprising.  (See the PDF linked at the bottom where it says “View complete question responses and trends.”)

For not only is the most important division by far the partisan split between Democrats and Republicans. It’s a gap that tends to be considerably wider than those between groups where divides in the last few years are supposed to have been especially and worrisomely gaping – between blacks and whites, between rich and poor, between the better educated and the less well educated.

For me, the big takeaway is that when Americans are in political moods, they get carried away by their emotions, with Republicans feeling awfully chipper about the state of the nation, and Democrats correspondingly gloomy. When they’re not preoccupied with politics, Americans seem more level-headed – and their outlooks are sunnier. But the unexpected findings scarcely stop there!

For example, let’s look at the internals of the headline satisfaction finding, which shows Americans’ feelings about the quality of their lives. A lofty 84 percent of all Americans told Gallup that they’re satisfied on this score, and 37 percent said they were “very satisfied.”

Republicans were the most satisfied Americans by a wide margin – an astonishing 96 percent called themselves satisfied, and 60 percent considered themselves “very satisfied.” The least satisfied group? Democrats. Their satisfaction levels were 77 percent satisfied and only 25 percent very satisfied.

But here’s what really grabbed my attention – and should grab yours. Keep in mind that the various groups of respondents overlap considerably (for example, both Democrats and Republicans include the wealthy and the poor, and the college-educated and the high school grads; and the both the wealthy and the poor include those identifying with both political parties).

The Democrats’ satisfaction levels were lower than those for non-whites (79 percent) and for Americans with a high school education or less (84 percent). That doesn’t sound very consistent with the notion that non-whites and those with relatively modest education levels are feeling especially downtrodden lately. But these readings definitely point to special degrees of unhappiness among Democrats. So does the fact that the “very satisfied” results for both these groups (31 percent and 34 percent, respectively) topped those for Democrats as well.

The partisan divide is even bigger, in both absolute and relative terms, for satisfaction levels regarding whether working hard can get a person ahead in America these days. In toto, 72 percent of respondents were satisfied and 43 percent were very satisfied with this situation. Non-whites’ overall satisfaction and very satisfied levels weren’t too far off those figures (71 percent and 37 percent, respectively). And the figures for those holding a high school degree at most were notably higher (77 percent and 51 percent, respectively).

But the Democrats’ results were completely in the dumps (only 47 percent and 19 percent, respectively).

Also interesting – non-whites, and Americans lacking college degrees are all more convinced than the college grads (68 percent) about the payoff of working hard, with respondents with a high school degree or less expressing the highest (77 percent) satisfaction level.

Satisfaction levels are much lower in absolute terms (43 percent overall) over the distribution of income and wealth in America – which should surprise no one. But again, those lacking a high school degree were more satisfied, and by a wide margin (49 percent), while the least satisfied (also by a wide margin) were the Democrats (21 percent).

The least educated were also more satisfied with the current rich-poor gap than college graduates (40 percent). But on this issue, non-white satisfaction levels were lower than the average (38 percent).

Gallup respondents were even less satisfied with the availability of healthcare in the United States, with only 37 percent expressing such views. Yet a familiar pattern emerges from the internals. The biggest gap was between Republicans (53 percent satisfied) and Democrats (27 percent). These also represented the highest and lowest levels of all the groups examined.

In addition, non-whites (41 percent) were more satisfied than whites the overall total (37 percent), and much more satisfied not only than the Democrats but than college grads (31 percent). The same held for Americans without high school diplomas (also 41 percent satisfied).

Finally, let’s look at a particularly explosive issue – race relations. Or at least it’s supposed to be particularly explosive. But according to the Gallup survey, there’s much more dissatisfaction than polarization – except among Democrats and Republicans.

Overall satisfaction levels are low – coming in at 36 percent. But the widest gap by far is between followers of the two parties, with 51 percent of Republican identifiers declaring themselves to be satisfied compared with only 24 percent of their Democratic counterparts. (Actually, Gallup also measured satisfaction levels according to political ideology – liberals, moderates, and conservatives. I’ve left these findings out due to the assumption because these results closely track the political parties’ results – which include independent voters. But according to this gauge, the conservative-liberal gap is somewhat wider, at 52 percent-17 percent.)

Most significantly, this partisan divide is far wider than the racial divide, with 35 percent of whites expressing satisfaction with the state of race relations and 39 percent of nonwhites so stating. Also doubtless significant: The next-least-satisfied group is college graduates, of whom only 28 percent expressed satisfaction. Further, their “very satisfied” levels (3 percent) were by far the lowest along with the Democrats’. And they were only one-third the nine percent “very satisfied” levels of non-whites.

Is the country indeed anxious?  To some extent, sure.  Is it divided?  That’s where the answer gets especially complicated.  And this complex picture indicates that, especially in this presidential campaign year, all Americans should beware of pundits and others bearing sweeping generalizations. 

Im-Politic: Surprisingly Upbeat Soundings on the American National Mood

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Gallup, Im-Politic, polls, pollsters, RealClearPolitics.com

However unreliable polls can be, when two of them come up with the same results, odds are they’re onto something. So that’s why I’m writing about some recent surveys pointing to a genuinely remarkable conclusion: For all the recent accounts of how unhappy and divided Americans have become about politics and the state of the country, surprisingly great numbers of Americans don’t seem to be angry at all about these subjects. Indeed, the national mood has actually been getting better lately.

There’s much more evidence for division, and that’s important. (That’s why RealityChek will describe them tomorrow.) But there’s not evidence of enough division to overturn the conclusion above.

The more detailed of these polls came out from Gallup – it’s actually two surveys. The first reports that, as of last month, 41 percent of respondents described themselves as “satisfied with the way things are going in the United States at this time.” That may not sound especially high, and its a lot lower than the all-time (since the question began to be asked in 1985) high of 55 percent, set in February, 1990. But it’s the first time that this number topped 40 percent since July, 2005.

Especially interesting: In January, 2017, the month President Trump was inaugurated, the satisfaction figure was 26 percent. (Click on the link at the bottom of the above-linked summary for the full data series.) So it’s been on the rise – with some fluctuations – ever since.

A few days later, Gallup released some findings showing that this rising satisfaction is pretty widespread across issue areas. Specifically, the organization measured respondents’ satisfaction levels on 28 policy issues and how they’ve changed from January, 2017 to January, 2020. Increases were registered on eight of these counts, satisfaction stayed steady for 17 (meaning that it neither rose nor fell by more than four percentage points), and satisfaction fell for only three.

But the internals are even more interesting. For example, the biggest increase in satisfaction levels – from 46 percent to 68 percent – came in “the state of the nation’s economy.” The next two biggest increases have to do with America’s safety from terrorism (from 50 percent to 68 percent) and overall “military strength and preparedness” (from 66 percent to 81 percent). And how about number four – “the state of race relations”? There, satisfaction levels are much lower in absolute terms, but they’ve grown from 22 percent to 36 percent.

Also revealing – although there hasn’t been much improvement in reported satisfaction in “the overall quality of life” (four percentage points) its absolute level is a towering 84 percent. Also holding pretty steady but exhibiting more than 50 percent satisfaction rates – “the influence of organized religion” (currently 59 percent); “the quality of medical care” (52 percent); and “the acceptance of gays and lesbians” (56 percent).

Not that Gallup is portraying Americans as happy campers about everything. As mentioned above, although satisfaction with race relations has improved notably, it still stands at only 36 percent. And an eight percentage-point improvement over the last three years has still left the satisfaction level with “the way wealth and income are distributed in the US” at only 43 percent.

Registering steady but low satisfaction levels as well are some major issues, including tax payments and “the availability of affordable healthcare” (both at 37 percent); “the quality of public education” (35 percent); America’s “moral and ethical climate (32 percent); and all by itself at the bottom in absolute terms, national efforts “to deal with poverty and homelessness” (22 percent).

The biggest drop in satisfaction levels of the 28 issues studied concerned abortion policies, where they tumbled from 39 percent to 32 percent. Satisfaction is down notably, too, when it comes to “the level of immigration in the country today” (from 41 percent to 35 percent) and environmental quality (from 52 percent to 46 percent). But the absolute level of satisfaction regarding the latter is reasonably high, while those for abortion and immigration are much lower.

The abortion and immigration results, however, illustrate one reason for caution in interpretation. In both cases, dissatisfaction could stem from beliefs that policies are too strict or too indulgent. The same holds for gun control (and its steady 42 percent satisfaction level) and government regulation of business (where satisfaction inched up from a low-ish 38 percent to 41 percent). And the biggest political questions about all the issues examined here remains open: Which ones will strongly motivate Americans to vote for particular candidates, and which ones won’t matter much at all in upcoming elections?

The other poll, or set of polls, indicating greater overall satisfaction with the country’s situation comes from the RealClearPolitics.com website, which maintains a running tally of surveys on numerous topics and then synthesizes the results to come up with an average polling universe-wide reading.

The “RCP average” doesn’t display any internals material, but it unmistakably shows the same trend at the Gallup polls. Its average of surveys gauging views of the “Direction of Country” reveals that through the end of last month, Americans believing that the country is on the “wrong track” considerably outnumber those believing that the country is on the “right track” – as they have with only a very brief exception since RCP began posting these averages.

Yet the latest 16.6 percentage point lead held by the “wrong trackers” over the “right trackers” is just over half its size (30.9 percentage points) on January 21, 2017 – the day after the Trump inauguration.

Despite these kind of upbeat results, however, the Gallup surveys also make clear that major splits still generally divide Americans on the issues mentioned above, although some of these gaps aren’t exactly yawning, and the scale and very nature of many others is pretty surprising. That’s what RealityChek will be describing in tomorrow’s post.